Saturday 15 May 2010 19.06 EDT
First published on Saturday 15 May 2010 19.06 EDT

There is apparently no truth in the rumour that when Fabio Capello was talking to Paul Scholes he asked him to check whether Ryan Giggs was sure he was still Welsh, but had it been confirmed by the England manager it would scarcely have made his World Cup squad announcement any more surreal.

Capello's shtick up till now has been making the job look easy, yet his handling of a seemingly routine task muddied waters he had made placid. Where there was harmony, he brought discord. Where there was faith, he introduced doubt. He also accomplished something entirely unexpected, something not many people would have even thought possible. He managed to create a sense of injustice over the exclusion of Gary Neville.

There. Thought that would make you gulp, so here are the facts. Capello's squad contains six centre‑halves – excessive even for an Italian – three left-backs and one right‑back. Neville is a career right‑back with 85 caps and five tournaments behind him. Jamie Carragher is not a right-back, certainly not at international level, and by his own admission is never at his best in that position, so Capello's excuse that he is in as cover for Glen Johnson seems rather thin.

Capello's originally stated intention was to have two specialist players for every position, so Wes Brown ought to have been the choice to back up Johnson. If Brown is injured, as Capello has decided is the case, then Neville should have been next in line.

Hang on a minute, I hear you say. Capello is selecting a World Cup party, not organising an old folks' outing. Surely Neville is past it by now? The pace is beginning to go, not all of his recent club performances have been convincing, and it has been unkindly remarked that he now resembles a fan who has won a competition to get to play for Manchester United.

That is harsh, though possibly fair, yet Carragher is open to similar charges. He, too, has lost pace and is being caught out more often, without having anything like the sort of season to warrant England coaches camping on his doorstep. While Liverpool's doughty stopper passes muster as a centre-half, where Capello would probably prefer to use him, he does not bring anything to full-back that Neville cannot supply.

Neville is 35, the same age as David Beckham, yet, despite being slower than a week in jail and barely able to last a whole match, England's former captain was a certainty for Capello's squad until he ruptured his achilles tendon. Even injured, Beckham is still going to South Africa with England, because his mere presence and tournament experience are considered valuable influences on younger players. Neville may or may not be miffed about that, having leadership qualities and no little experience of his own, though being human he could hardly fail to be hurt at discovering the lengths to which Capello was prepared to go to get Scholes to change his mind about international retirement.

Scholes is three months older than Neville and, while he is undoubtedly still worth a place in any squad and Capello was perfectly within his rights to explore the option, there was something unseemly and somewhat disheartening about not one but two players being begged to return on the eve of a tournament for which qualification had been achieved without them.

Neville's own position on that subject is admirably clear. "I will never retire myself from England," he has said. "That decision is not for me to make." Confidants say he was not particularly expecting to go to this World Cup, having recognised he had Johnson and Brown ahead of him, but if selected he would have been there like a shot. What Neville cannot have been expecting was for the England manager to casually remark, when asked about the single right-back in his squad, that he would be prepared to change the whole formation if necessary.

"I can change the style," Capello argued breezily. "I can play with three centre‑backs. This is another option."

Let's see how that goes, then. It would at least explain the preponderance of centre-halves, and not even Neville would wish to be called up at this stage of his career as a wing-back. In all probability, however, Capello will be using four at the back in most games, and it seems odd that in a preliminary squad of 30, not even the final 23, he has named only one right-back. Neville is willing and available, yet it seems Capello prefers a converted centre-half who turned his back on England once for playing him out of position, a left‑back, a midfielder or a completely new system.

There is a theory that right-back is the least important position on the field, on the basis that every other position is more specialist. Even left‑back generally requires being left‑footed, and relatively few players are equipped for the role. This argument can be extended into the rather brutal suggestion that a right‑back is often the worst player on any given team, since were he better in any other position he would find himself there. In other words, the position ought to be easy to fill, not a persistent problem like left-wing or goalkeeper. So if there is really only one decent right-back to be found in England, we could be in more trouble than we think.